Brettia

So now it’s been another two months since I last posted. Great. I’m not even going to try to apologize anymore because I know I’ll probably have the same kind of uber-delay between this entry and the next one. I bet no one even reads these anymore. I’m going to try to do what I did the last time I posted after a long absence — recap the important things and then get philosophical with it at one point or another.

I honestly can’t believe that my school year is now three-fourths of the way finished, nor can I believe that I am almost halfway through the IB program. I’ll talk more about my current stance when it comes to IB a bit later, but I want to keep this (sort of) chronological, so I’ll start with one of the first major things that happened during my absence from this site — the arrival of my ACT scores in early March. If you remember from my last entry, I didn’t feel too confident that I had done well on the test:

I still have a feeling that I’ll get back the results only to see that I got near-perfect scores on the first two parts and shitty ones on the second two, leaving me with a rather dismal 25 or 28 rather than the 32-36 that I had been hoping for.

This is classic me; I always feel like I’ve bombed an assignment, and then I’ll get it back with an A+ and a smiley face. I have no self-confidence, yet I have an insane determination to make myself confident about the quality of my work — an impossible task. Anyway, I got the scores back, and they weren’t too bad: 35s in english, math and science, and a 28 in reading (probably because I didn’t answer the last six questions due to a lack of time). My total score: a 34. Needless to say, I was overjoyed, though I was surprised that such a comparatively terrible reading score didn’t change my average by more than a point. The only part of my results that disappointed me was the writing portion, which is new as of about two or three years ago. Out of twelve possible points, I managed a dismal eight. I almost laughed out loud when I saw it, since it was rather ironic that a student who is generally considered to be among the best writers in his grade would score that badly. There were some generic comments at the bottom of the result sheet that were supposed to tell me what was wrong with my essay, but they were all positive except for one that said something like, “Student addressed counter-arguments but did not go deeply into them.” Oh well, I guess. I’ve been told by a family friend who works in a high school counseling department that the writing portion doesn’t carry much weight with colleges because it is so new, so I won’t worry about it.

February and the first part of March were fairly uneventful other than that day. I continued my accumulation of uber-CAS hours by working on the school newspaper once more, helping people in the writing center, and some church activities. I also procrastinated - a lot. I never really got around to writing that wonderful bit of brilliance that I alluded to a couple of entries ago — not that the desire to write went away, I was just bogged down in homework. The third term was the first time that I had IB Physics as a part of the AP Physics course instead of Honors Physics, so the work suddenly became a good deal harder. It was also my first term of IB Biology, as I said before, and I shot myself repeatedly in both feet by not paying much attention in class and not doing my assigned workbook pages (which never were checked off or graded). My other classes didn’t change a whole lot: English remained difficult and stressful, yet satisfying; History continued to be incredibly easy and sometimes boring; and Spanish improved slightly yet still makes me yawn just thinking about it.

Things finally began to get interesting beginning in the middle of March, when projects started to come due and the stress level began to rise. In English, a compare-contrast paper on two different translations of Albert Camus’ The Stranger nearly destroyed me because of its difficulty — the translations were nearly identical and the only way to find any differences between them was to re-read large parts of the book in both editions. But after a grueling nine hours of tearing my hair out over what point I was trying to make with my paper and making endless revisions, I got it finished. I had to do my self-assessment at school in the morning because it was so late when I finally went to bed that night, and I figured that there was no way that it was any good, but, as usual, it came back with a happy little 20 on the back page (a perfect score) and lots of confidence-building comments.

Of course, those comments meant nothing two weeks later, when I began work on a presentation about various modern-era concepts (materialism, male domination of women, etc.) found in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House, also for English. I was scheduled to give it on Tuesday, and I was up incredibly late the night before preparing my PowerPoint for it. By the time I was done, I felt it was pretty bad, mainly because it had almost no real focus and tried to make use of too many other works along with A Doll House. I got “lucky” on Tueday when, after all that stress and general unhappiness, my presentation somehow got corrupted both on a CD that I had burned it to and on my iPod. I’m not really sure what happened, but it kept me from having to do it until Friday because Wednesday was a teacher grading day and my English teacher was sick on Thursday. I made some major revisions on that Wednesday but still didn’t feel as if it was ready; then I had no time to work on it Thursday night, so I basically figured the whole thing out in about an hour in study hall Friday morning. I printed an outline of my presentation, made plenty of notes all over it, read it over twice, never actually practiced it out loud, walked right into my English classroom, and finally got it over with. And it wasn’t half bad. My delivery could have been better — I stumbled a few times and repeated myself once or twice — but on the whole the content made sense and didn’t suck. I talked to my teacher again on Friday afternoon because I knew that term three grades had to be submitted by then and was told that I had narrowly escaped the abyss once again — I had another perfect score to add to my collection. It was a rather good day.

The physics saga that had been playing itself out over the past few weeks has been a different story. The teacher is incredibly lax about due dates, so I waited to do many of my lab write-ups for this term until about a week ago. Then, on the day before the day that all the labs were supposedly due, I was “sick.” (I really did have a headache, but I’m not sure that it was bad enough to merit skipping school.) I did four labs that day, each one taking at least an hour to remember exactly what the experiment was all about, describe the procedure and results as concisely as possible, and then format it nicely. That final step in the process was sometimes the most time-consuming — I ended up learning way more about Microsoft Word than I ever wanted to know. For example, you can switch to subscript mode by pressing CTRL-= and superscript mode by pressing CTRL-SHIFT-=. Unfortunately, I didn’t take the time to look that up until I had wasted countless seconds going to Format -> Fontâ?¦ and changing it in the resulting dialog box when typing up the first three labs. Still, I got them all done, and I did even more over the weekend and on the Wednesday that we had off. Amazingly enough, a few of them actually didn’t suck too badly, which for me was a major improvement over some of the labs I did earlier in the year.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I never can seem to “get” physics like I do other subjects. It’s not because I don’t like it; I hate math with a passion, yet I still get As in it without too much difficulty. At first I just figured that maybe I had finally found a subject that I was simply predestined to “not get.” I can’t be good at everything. But although it seemed unlikely that I would ever reach a happy relationship with my physics class, in the last term, I really tried to get it. And yet things still didn’t click. I tried actually reading our textbook, and that was kind of helpful, but I still got low Bs on several tests. I did most of the homework or at least made sure I understood the problems, and I worked with the other two IB Physics kids when I got stuck rather than trying to understand everything on my own. Even if my grade in the class stayed relatively low (a teetering A-, gasp!), I at least wanted to feel prepared for the IB Physics exam in early May.

Unfortunately, I still didn’t see even the slightest uptick in my test scores, and it was frustrating. I felt I was doing everything I possibly could to succeed, but low Bs didn’t feel like much of a reward. However, every once in a while I would be hit with flashes of brilliance — an especially good lab write-up or perfect understanding of a difficult problem. I didn’t do half bad on the electricity unit. Still, I didn’t feel that great about the class. Now that I’m no longer in it (IB Physics is only three terms), I think the real issue lay with the failings of my teacher. He was a great guy, but he neglected to give the IB students any real IB-specific material until the last two weeks of the third term. It was like he had suddenly remembered that we needed to know all the concepts that IB wanted us to know along with the usual Honors/AP physics concepts, so he had to rush to pack it all in. Also, he didn’t seem to care too much when I would score particularly badly on a test or on assessment problems, as if he had just marked me as an average or bad student who wouldn’t get any better no matter what he did. When I would ask for help, he would usually walk me through things pretty well, but I always kind of felt as if he was mocking me for being dumb enough to not understand what he was explaining the first time around. It certainly wasn’t all his fault (I know I’ll never really like science classes after being turned against them by an exceedingly boring biology class freshman year.), but I think the IB students who take physics next year will have a much better experience because he realizes that he didn’t do as well with the three guinea pig students as he could have.

While I’m going through all of my classes, I might was well mention history and Spanish. I really wish that my history class this year was as in-depth and challenging as AP European History at Cactus Shadows. My current class feels like AP Euro but dumbed-down so that even C-students can get As on just about everything. It’s not so bad, I guess, because the teacher is nice enough to let me stretch some of our assigned essay topics so that “Blame either Hitler, Truman, or Stalin for starting the Cold War and support your opinion” (an impossible prompt because no one leader sparked it) becomes “Discuss Russian animosity toward the West and how it built up over the years leading up to the Cold War.” I’m usually not really learning anything, but I guess that doesn’t matter as long as I meet the all-important IB objectives.

Something interesting did happen in history a few weeks ago, however, though it wasn’t at all educational. I and the other students arrived at class one day to find that the teacher was sick and there was a substitute. That day happened to be one of the four days each year when “student showcase” performances begin every 45 minutes in the Little Theater, the school’s tiny auditorium. Usually the performances are really good, so naturally everyone wanted to go. After much whining and coercion, we convinced the substitute to let our class go, and once she had meticulously checked to see if we were present and slowly written down the names of everyone who was absent, we were finally allowed to leave (the sub stayed behind). Unfortunately, because the sub took so long to take roll, there was no more room in the Little Theater to accomodate us. We were trudging back toward the history classroom when someone suggested that we not go back to class. Most of us balked at that idea — where could we possibly go without it being blatantly obvious that fifteen students were not where they should be?

A few places, like the library, were suggested and then shot down, but then someone shouted, “Let’s go get bagels somewhere!” For a split-second, there was a pause as everyone present tried to comprehend the absurdity of that statement and overcome the voice of reason inside them. Then, we were suddenly all walking down the main hallway again, toward a door that would lead us to the parking lot. For a moment, I briefly considered resisting, but then I realized that there was no way I could go back to class without the sub asking why the other fourteen students hadn’t returned. Anyway, it was a Friday, and we were all feeling stressed out and spontaneously mischievious. So we went.

We continued down the hallway, some of us chatting about how we would never make it without being caught; there were just too many of us. Then we were outside, a water bottle holding the door safely open so that we could get back in when returned. Clumping into car-size groups of three and four, we strode confidently into the parking lot, knowing that security cameras were recording our every move and the resident policeman could be on us at any moment. I crammed myself into a friend’s VW beetle alongside two other people, she drove out of the parking lot in the wrong lane, down the heavily-patrolled Bolson Drive, and away to freedom. I couldn’t believe it.

Somehow, we all reached the place where we were getting bagels without being caught. Even though there were fifteen of us, we ordered our food and proceeded to stay another half-hour to eat it and chat about our victory without the staff calling the school. For the first few minutes of our little escapade, I was nervous and starting to feel as if I shouldn’t have gone. But the other half of me was rebellious and ready to do something stupid for once, and that half won my inner battle. There was a kind of aura of reckless joy that was pervasive among us — we had all worked harder in school than we ever had for over a semester with no real reward or congratulations from anyone, so we felt that we deserved our 30 minutes of happiness, a momentary calm during a vicious tempest. It was one of those things that was justifiable, yet still stupid.

We had achieved the impossible — escape from our prison — but once our time was up, we had to do it all over again to get inside the school and back to class so that the sub would think that we had gone to showcase like good little IB angels. The drive back was quiet, with all present in the car knowing that we were fast approaching the moment when we were most likely to be caught. The girl who was driving parked in the same spot as before and put her parking tag back up (it had been quickly removed on the way out when we realized that it would identify us immediately as high school students). We collected ourselves for a moment, then got out of the car and walked briskly back toward the door we had “escaped” from. The four of us were the only ones there at the time; it had been decided at the bagel shop that we would try to stagger our arrivals so that it wasn’t as conspicuous as the first time around. As we approached the entryway, I looked up at the exterior security camera mounted on the wall nearby, grinned, and waved. It’s not as if they ever check those tapes, anyway. Thankfully, the water bottle propping open the door was still there, and I carefully replaced it for the other ten students after we had gone inside. Then we simply walked around the school for a few minutes until we had met everyone else, avoiding teachers like the plague, and finally we regrouped near our history classroom just as kids began to leave the Little Theater after showcase.

We all walked into the history classroom together, as if we had just come back from a really good show (we were certainly all jumpy and nervous with excitement), and we told the sub how good it was. The lies flew thick and it was difficult sometimes not to crack a smile. The bell rang about three minutes later, and we all “escaped” yet again — we got out of the classroom as quickly as we could before the sub realized that something was up. We had done it, though with the combined brainpower of fifteen IB students on our side, I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised that our little spontaneous “plan” worked. Even if we had been caught on the way back, it would have been worth it. Anyway, what would the administration have done to punish a large group of IB diploma candidates that had wantonly run off? The only “punishment” that I could think of was some kind of group therapy, since it was pretty obvious that it was the workload that drove us to do what we did. The workload, and the fact that, though it’s great to be little trophies that our parents can brag to their friends about, sometimes even IB kids have to live a little.